Author: CCW

“The man believed the word which Jesus had spoken”

“Faith cometh by hearing”, St. Paul remarks, setting up an interesting contrast between the two most intellectual of the senses, hearing and seeing. It is interesting to see how that contrast plays out in the Scriptures and, then, in the various forms of cultural expression. The ancient Greek world, as Alberto Manguel observes, largely expresses itself in monuments, statues and buildings, think of the Parthenon, the Venus de Milo, and Greek amphitheaters. Jewish or Hebrew culture, on the other hand, expresses itself more through words spoken and then written down, the Scriptures. Later one might contrast Catholic and Protestant Europe and its successors in terms of the prominence given to the visual – things seen – in Roman Catholic Churches as distinct from the emphasis given to things audible – words and music – in Protestant churches. These are, I hasten to add, primarily differences of emphasis and not categories of exclusion one way or the other. At issue are the respective forms of balance between the Word visible and the Word audible such as in our own liturgy in terms of Word and Sacrament.

Such things speak to the forms of our understanding about matters spiritual. In today’s gospel a certain priority is given to hearing in the story of the healing of the nobleman’s son. The nobleman having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again and all without seeing. This happens in the context of Jesus’ general remark and critical observation that challenges the empirical aspects of our own culture. What is heard and believed actually stands in complete contrast to what apparently is wanted to be seen. As Jesus notes, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.” It is a critical comment that hints at a problem, namely the idea of demanding that things be literally visible and sensible as distinct from intelligible. God, of course, by definition cannot be seen and his grace made manifest in human lives is not really something that can be empirically grasped and measured, put into a test-tube or particle accelerator or somehow quantitatively known. The deeper question is more about how God’s grace lives and moves in us, how God’s word has its resonance in us, literally, how it is echoed in us. The catechism, for instance, means an instruction but the actual word is about what is being echoed in us.

We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvellous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland of the spirit, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, reminding us, too, of the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and culture.

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“What are these who are arrayed in white robes?”

It is “that time of year,” in Shakespeare’s wonderful Sonnet # 73, “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” And yet we find ourselves in a great company, the company of the saints, a company which embraces as well the solemnity of All Souls, the remembrance of our common mortality, the picture of death without which All Saints becomes simply an escape and a fantasy rather than a reality.

November is the barren month, to be sure, with the leaves all scattered on the wind and the fields all stripped of the harvest fruits, and where nature slowly settles into its winter’s sleep. In contrast to those natural themes we are recalled to our spiritual vocation and home. The vocation of our humanity is the call to holiness. “What are these?” the great lesson from All Saints’ Day asks about a multitude greater than any man can number. The same question is before us on All Souls’ Day. We try in our own poor way to remember those who have gone before us and whom we have known only to discover the frailties of our memories. Thus All Souls’ equally reminds us of the very thing which All Saints’ celebrates: the truth of our humanity as found in God which does not negate nor deny death.

“These are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” It is all about how we are defined not by the circumstances and trials and tribulations in our lives but by grace, the grace of the lamb. That is the great point of both the lesson from Wisdom tonight and the great Gospel of The Beatitudes. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It doesn’t mean that there won’t be loss and grief, suffering and death. Even more “blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” There is no hiding the grim and barren realities of our world and day which witnesses more and more to the radical instability of the self, to a kind of destructive nihilism, either of one self or others. All Saints and All Souls recall us to our spiritual identity in and through the realities of our everyday lives, including death. We are being given a way to think positively and in a healthy way about death and suffering, even about sin and evil.

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“All things are ready”

Are we ready? “All things are ready,” we are told. Ready for what? What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? And what is the wedding garment which seems to be so necessary such that without it we are cast out just when we think we are safely in; indeed “cast into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Not exactly a pleasing prospect.

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. “The days are evil,” St. Paul reminds us, and yet he bids us “be ye not unwise”. The quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. The times in which we live are rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question for Christians “at all times and in all places” is whether we will be defined by circumstances or by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us and for us, come what may in the world around us including the sad parade of our own sins and follies.

One thinks, for instance, of St. Augustine, dying in his Episcopal see of Hippo Regius in 430 AD, even as the armies of the Vandals were besieging the city, about to obliterate what had been the work of a life-time in the formation of Christian souls and the development of a Christian culture. It was the first of a series of invasions that would virtually obliterate any trace of North African Christianity. It was to survive principally in the writings of its theologians, chief of whom was Augustine, whose writings would contribute greatly to the shaping of Europe.

Or one thinks, perhaps, of a Dante, cast out of his beloved city of Florence and into the dark wood of exile. And yet, in spite of his exile, or, perhaps, because of it, he produced the greatest epic poem of Christian pilgrimage of all times, The Divine Comedy, “to lead those”, as he says, “in a state of misery to the state of felicity”.

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